I use Gentoo since the time when we used stage1-installation. So I am a user (no, I am admin) since 8 or 9 years or so.
From time to time printing does not work. Printing is one of the things in an office which *have to work always*. If printing is broken, it is like the secretary is dead (metaphor).
- I used x86 and x86_64 systems.
- All the years I use a postscript 2 laser printer named "HP Laserjet 1300" with 80 MB of RAM
I use the printer connected to my server via usb from all client systems in my network (5 very different systems).

From time to time there are problems in different parts of the printing process:
- cups
- poppler (or firefox which uses it - wrong ?!)
- ghostscript
- cups-pdf
- bad config files
- broken usb drivers
- combinations of the software above
- combinations with different versions

I am sure that lots of other people have same or similar negative experiences with printing.

I think we need a gentoo working group which cares about printing. A quality ensurance group.

Printing is a mess, but Gentoo can't solve it, only improve the situation a bit._________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

Just very quickly like that, is it possible the process is so old and outdated so that creates some incompatible issues with todays modern hardware which can xmit super fast information.

The only example I can provide is if you use the Zebra tec b-472 industrial printer and you use it with today's hardware, you can get communication error because the printer receives the data too fast so it goes beserk and the printer don't know what to do. In my case, I have to shut it down, power it up and hope to god it doesn't break again. I mean, that printer still uses parallel port so even if I use a printer server and/or usb adapter, it's still going to create problems.

Going back to the process maybe it needs those types of updates. Without looking at the code, I could assume the data is not received or xmit'ed correctly because of today's hardware. Of course I could be wrong._________________I'm a noob, be gentle with me. TEACH ME

A new printing process is out of the scope of this thread. Beside I think a Postcript-Level-2/3-Printer is modern. The only requirement is to send postscript to the printer.

My focus with this thread is to find trivial problems before publishing new ebuilds. Trivial means: forget to initialize variables in poppler for example (#426552). This kind of trivial bugs could be noticed with a simple testing process.

A good example for a trivial problem is a bug in cifs-utils with the executable mount.cifs. The only job for this tool is to mount cifs-shares (samba-shares). The bug was that mounting cifs-shares did not work. I really wonder, why nobody recognized this bug. The answer could be: no testing at all!